doubleofive said:

Tobar said:

CP3S said:
I'm not sure how abrupt the announcement of its cancellation was, but I don't think it ever did well enough that anyone should have expected a second season.
I was actually referring to LOST in that first part addressed to you. =P
3 years. Lost set itself a death date so that they would be able to aim towards an end goal. What's odd is that's EXACTLY when it started wandering away from a goal at all.

Ah, that is funny, I've heard a lot of people say the abrupt and silly ending to the American remake of Life on Mars was likely due to it being cancelled at short notice with the writers scrambling to tie it up real quick; so I thought that was what you were talking about.

Yeah, like 005 said, they had three years of knowing exactly how many episodes they had left. The show wasn't cancelled, actually, the show runners asked for a definite end date so that they knew just how long they had to drag out the story for, and because they didn't want it to drag on forever like some shows that studios never let die. This all came about after the show began to tank hard during season three (the story went almost nowhere in that season, and we were given some very mundane episodes, like the stupid one about Jack's tattoos). That is why the last three seasons are shorter than the first three, they wanted to end it with season five, but ABC told them they wanted three more years of the show (from season three) so the agreement was that they would do three seasons containing the same number of episodes that would normally be in two seasons.